Compilation of Reports from the First Round of Committees of Visitors' Reviews of the Fusion Energy Sciences Program PDF Download

Author: United States. Department of Energy. Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee
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Category : Controlled fusion
Languages : en
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Languages : en
Pages : 17

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A Committee of Visitors (COV) was formed to review the procedures used by the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences to manage its Theory and Computations program. The COV was pleased to conclude that the research portfolio supported by the OFES Theory and Computations Program was of very high quality. The Program supports research programs at universities, research industries, and national laboratories that are well regarded internationally and address questions of high relevance to the DOE. A major change in the management of the Theory and Computations program over the past few years has been the introduction of a system of comparative peer review to guide the OFES Theory Team in selecting proposals for funding. The COV was impressed with the success of OFES in its implementation of comparative peer review and with the quality of the reviewers chosen by the OFES Theory Team. The COV concluded that the competitive peer review process has improved steadily over the three years that it has been in effect and that it has improved both the fairness and accountability of the proposal review process. While the COV commends OFES in its implementation of comparative review, the COV offers the following recommendations in the hope that they will further improve the comparative peer review process: The OFES should improve the consistency of peer reviews. We recommend adoption of a "results-oriented" scoring system in their guidelines to referees (see Appendix II), a greater use of review panels, and a standard format for proposals; The OFES should further improve the procedures and documentation for proposal handling. We recommend that the "folders" documenting funding decisions contain all the input from all of the reviewers, that OFES document their rationale for funding decisions which are at variance with the recommendation of the peer reviewers, and that OFES provide a Summary Sheet within each folder; The OFES should better communicate the procedures used to determine funding levels. We recommend that the OFES communicate a clear and consistent policy on the level at which successful proposals are funded to both PI's and reviewers and document their rationale for the funding level of successful proposals; The OFES should add additional criterion when evaluating large university and laboratory theory groups with multiple investigators. We recommend that larger theory groups include an additional review criterion including clear evidence of collaborative work and the extent to which the group addresses problems requiring a team effort and that the threshold (currently 6 FTE's) for holding an on-site panel review of theory groups be reduced; The OFES should increase opportunities for new investigators (who have not previously received fusion theory and computations grants). We recommend that the OFES track the success rate for proposals by new investigators and that OFES consider ways that increase the success rate for proposals from new investigators; and, The OFES should encourage greater interaction between the theory and experimental programs. We recommend that experimentalists be invited to participate in the peer review process for theory grants and that reviewer evaluation criteria include efforts to validate theoretical models.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309073456
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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The purpose of this assessment of the fusion energy sciences program of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science is to evaluate the quality of the research program and to provide guidance for the future program strategy aimed at strengthening the research component of the program. The committee focused its review of the fusion program on magnetic confinement, or magnetic fusion energy (MFE), and touched only briefly on inertial fusion energy (IFE), because MFE-relevant research accounts for roughly 95 percent of the funding in the Office of Science's fusion program. Unless otherwise noted, all references to fusion in this report should be assumed to refer to magnetic fusion. Fusion research carried out in the United States under the sponsorship of the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (OFES) has made remarkable strides over the years and recently passed several important milestones. For example, weakly burning plasmas with temperatures greatly exceeding those on the surface of the Sun have been created and diagnosed. Significant progress has been made in understanding and controlling instabilities and turbulence in plasma fusion experiments, thereby facilitating improved plasma confinement-remotely controlling turbulence in a 100-million-degree medium is a premier scientific achievement by any measure. Theory and modeling are now able to provide useful insights into instabilities and to guide experiments. Experiments and associated diagnostics are now able to extract enough information about the processes occurring in high-temperature plasmas to guide further developments in theory and modeling. Many of the major experimental and theoretical tools that have been developed are now converging to produce a qualitative change in the program's approach to scientific discovery. The U.S. program has traditionally been an important source of innovation and discovery for the international fusion energy effort. The goal of understanding at a fundamental level the physical processes governing observed plasma behavior has been a distinguishing feature of the program.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Subcommittee on Energy
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Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Distributed to some depository libraries in microfiche.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
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Category : Controlled fusion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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The Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee was asked to conduct a review of Fusion Materials Research Program (the Structural Materials portion of the Fusion Program) by Dr. Martha Krebs, Director of Energy Research for the Department of Energy. This request was motivated by the fact that significant changes have been made in the overall direction of the Fusion Program from one primarily focused on the milestones necessary to the construction of successively larger machines to one where the necessary scientific basis for an attractive fusion energy system is. better understood. It was in this context that the review of current scientific excellence and recommendations for future goals and balance within the Program was requested.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight
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Category : Fusion reactors
Languages : en
Pages : 820

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Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science and Technology (2007). Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
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Category : Nuclear energy
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science. Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
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Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (2011). Subcommittee on Energy
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Category : Nuclear energy
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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